Thursday, February 28, 2008

It's really infuriating to me that some Jews have started to believe the disgusting rumors passed around about Obama - that he's anti-semitic, anti-Israel, "really" a Muslim who studied in a madrassa in Indonesia, etc. In the debate the other day, Obama did everything he could possibly do to state his support of Israel and his contempt for anti-semitism.

Asked by moderator Tim Russert what he could do to reassure Jewish Americans, Obama cited his belief that Israel's security is "sacrosanct." He also said he has strong support in the Jewish community because of his opposition to anti-Semitism and his efforts to rebuild the relationship between Jews and African Americans.

I found his remarks quite moving, especially when he talked about wanting to rebuild the relationship between Jews and Blacks. It was quite refreshing to hear him talk honestly about the fact that there have been significant tensions between Jews and Blacks over the past several decades. It's this kind of honesty that makes me support Obama.

So why do some Jews so enthusiastically accept Hagee's support, when what he's really hoping for is an apocalyptic war that will kill most Jews in the world, and the same people then denounce Obama for supposedly being anti-Israel? Is there something wrong with their perceptions of reality?

Wow, some depressing news today. The first item is John Hagee's endorsement of John McCain for President. (I wrote on Hagee previously - see Hagee).

Hagee's comments about world affairs can make Farrakhan seem pedestrian at times: He eagerly awaits the Armageddon, considers the Catholic Church to be the Anti-Christ, and has said that Jews brought their own persecution upon themselves....

Boy! Anti-semitic and anti-Catholic - a bigotry twofer! It's rare that I find myself agreeing with Bill Donohue, but in this case he's spot on. Here's more on Donohue's objections:

Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement today that Hagee has written extensively in negative ways about the Catholic Church, "calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system.'"

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

This guy really does fascinate me, but I hope my small band of readers isn't getting too bored by my posts about him. It amazes me that he ever managed to become a tenured professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago - a "Distinguished Professor," no less.

I just found a review of his memoir, Fugitive Days, which was published on August 22, 2001, on Slate: Radical Chic Resurgent, which is even more cutting than the New York Times' articles I've been quoting. The review begins: "Chatterbox isn't sure he's ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days."

In the wake of Sept. 11, Chatterbox has developed a morbid fascination with Bill Ayers' foiled publicity campaign for Fugitive Days, his memoir of the Weather Underground. As Chatterbox noted before, Fugitive Days tries to pass off armed rebellion against the United States as a sort of lark. In the book, Ayers maintains that he was not a terrorist because terrorists "kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated." Chatterbox demurs. Any group that sets off two dozen bombs, including one at the Pentagon and one at the U.S. Capitol, as the Weather Underground did during the early 1970s, ought to be called a terrorist group. (The Weather Underground doesn't appear to have killed anybody, unless you count the accidental deaths by explosives of a few of its members, but the lack of other casualties seems largely to have been a matter of luck.) Remember, too, that Ayers told his followers, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." This earns Ayers at least some spiritual kinship to Osama Bin Laden.

He continues about Ayers' marketing problems for the memoir after September 11:

But the post-Sept. 11 environment poses a significant marketing challenge to Fugitive Days. Accordingly, Beacon Press has announced that it will "suspend promotional activity for this book out of respect for all those who died, their families and friends." Ayers has posted on Beacon Press' Web site a statement denouncing "the barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings last Tuesday" and expressing regret that his book should be published "in a radically changed context ... the temptation for some is to collapse time." In truth, though, the main thing this "changed context" does is remind the public that people who set off bombs run a significant risk of killing other people, even if, in spite of their public pronouncements, they don't really want to kill other people.

But the spotlight on Churchill revealed numerous complaints of academic misconduct that had been raised by other academics, but never addressed by CU. He was accused of plagiarism, inventing historical incidents and ghostwriting essays which he then cited in his footnotes in support of his own views.

"I'm glad that scholarship, or the ideal of scholarship, won out over somebody's weird view of political correctness," he said. "I'm happy that it happened, that he's been found out, and, by his peers - meaning other university people - and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and a liar."

Robertson's book was among those cited by investigators as having been mischaracterized by Churchill.

"Facts are facts and truth is truth, and when youre dealing with history I think it doesn't need to be distorted by people with a warped political objective," Robertson said.

Another author whose work was mischaracterized by Churchill said the firing was appropriate punishment.

"It's important to know Indian history, and it's important to know factual Indian history, not just a bunch of B.S. that someone made up," said Russell Thornton, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

I discovered that Bill Ayers has a blog, and scrolling through it just now, I found his apologia for his terrorist actions. He dresses up his violent acts with a lot of warmed over anti-imperialist rhetoric, but it's still a justification for bombings that could have killed innocent people.

A very softball interview with Ayers and Dohrn in an issue of In These Times a couple of years ago: Debunking the 60s with Ayers and Dohrn. Of course, there's no mention of the terrorist crimes they were involved in.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Politico posted a story yesterday on Barack Obama's encounters in Chicago with two radicals from the 60s who are responsible for terrorist acts - Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were members of the Weather Underground. My issue is not whether Obama has any serious connection with these two people - I see no evidence of that, and he denounced their terrorist actions through a spokesman for his campaign. What bothers me is how these two people have managed to get away with their crimes with very little or no punishment and subsequently have reached important positions in American academia - both are tenured professors.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life. They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members. Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

I read about this story about a week ago somewhere else on the web and went to look up Ayers' history. What I found was, frankly, disgusting. In September of 2001, Ayers published a sort of memoir/sort of fictional account of his life, Fugitive Days (Beacon Press). A review of the book/interview with him was published on September 11 (obviously, when it was printed on that day, no one knew what it would forever be remembered for - but it's definitely apposite, considering what he had to say about terrorism). (Read this Clyde Haberman article from September 10, 2002, which is an attempt to replicate how September 11 felt just before the attacks - he refers to the article on Ayers). He is totally unrepentant about the acts of violence he committed. Among other things, this is what the New York Times article said about him:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago....

Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education [my emphasis] at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ''whirlpool of violence.''

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'' He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive. Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail....

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

''I don't think you can understand a single thing we did without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War,'' he said, and the fact that ''the enduring scar of racism was fully in flower.'' Mr. Ayers pointed to Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, who has admitted leading a raid in 1969 in which Vietnamese women and children were killed. ''He committed an act of terrorism,'' Mr. Ayers said. ''I didn't kill innocent people.'' ....

All in all, Mr. Ayers had ''a golden childhood,'' he said, though he did have a love affair with explosives. On July 4, he writes, ''my brothers and I loved everything about the wild displays of noise and color, the flares, the surprising candle bombs, but we trembled mostly for the Big Ones, the loud concussions.''

The love affair seems to have continued into adulthood. Even today, he finds ''a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,'' he writes.

He attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then the University of Michigan but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: ''It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.''

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight -- antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ''conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.'' Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states....

In the mid-1970's the Weathermen began quarreling. One faction, including Ms. Boudin, wanted to join the Black Liberation Army. Others, including Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers, favored surrendering. Ms. Boudin and Ms. Dohrn had had an intense friendship but broke apart. Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn were purged from the group.

Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers had a son, Zayd, in 1977. After the birth of Malik, in 1980, they decided to surface. Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined $1,500. The Federal charges against Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had already been dropped.

Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn tried to persuade Ms. Boudin to surrender because she was pregnant. But she refused, and went on to participate in the Brink's robbery. When she was arrested, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers volunteered to care for Chesa, then 14 months old, and became his legal guardians.

A few months later Ms. Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. Ms. Dohrn had not seen Ms. Boudin for a year, she said, and knew nothing of it. Ms. Dohrn was asked to give a handwriting sample, and refused, she said, because the F.B.I. already had one in its possession. ''I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive,'' she said. For refusing to testify, she was jailed for seven months, and she and Mr. Ayers married during a furlough.....

So Ayers didn't regret setting the bombs, nor does he think they did enough. Everything was ideal on the day he set the bomb at the Pentagon. But it's okay, because he didn't actually kill any innocent people. Well, if the bomb that blew up the townhouse in Greenwich Village had actually been used against (and killed) the army officers it was intended for - would that still have been okay because the officers wouldn't have been "innocent"?

On September 16, an interview with Ayers was published in the New York Times magazine. It appears that the magazine had gone to press before September 11, because the interview with him refers in no way to the terrorist attacks on that day. On that same day a letter to the editor from Ayers was published, completely contradicting everything he'd said in the September 11 article. This letter was obviously written after the September 11 attacks. In it he says:

The barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings on Sept. 11 has in an instant transformed the complex landscape of American consciousness. I'm filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed, for their families and for all affected forever. ''Fugitive Days,'' the memoir I've written about my participation in the Weather Underground and the antiwar movement and the events of 30 years ago, is now receiving attention in a radically changed context. My book is a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms. We are witnessing crimes against humanity. The intent of my book was and is to understand, to tell the truth and to heal.

Brent Staples then published an excoriating review of Ayers' book (on September 30, 2001, in the Times) which takes apart all of Ayers' rationalizations and refusals to take responsibility for himself.

Kathy Boudin has served 17 years in prison for her role in a 1981 Brink's robbery that left a guard and two police officers dead and nine children fatherless. She received a sentence of 20 years to life, but in most cases an inmate with her record of model behavior could expect parole. Few people were surprised, though, when Boudin was turned down for parole at a widely publicized hearing in August. Prison officials cited the extraordinary violence of the crime. But looming over the case was Boudin's membership in the Weathermen, a spinoff of Students for a Democratic Society. A group of affluent white kids, they played at being revolutionaries during the 1970's and took credit for bombing two dozen public buildings, including the Pentagon. The group was defunct by 1981, when Boudin joined a band of thugs associated with the Black Liberation Army -- an offshoot of the Black Panther Party -- which executed the Brink's truck robbery and, to judge from bomb paraphernalia and plans found after the robbery, seemed ready to blow up several New York City police stations. The robbery made clear the extent to which the student protest movement of the 1960's had deteriorated into naked criminality.

Boudin, at 58, is confronting the possibility of spending the rest of her middle age in prison. But her former comrades Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, members of the Weathermen high command -- once known as the Weatherbureau -- who led the group through its most violent period in the 1970's, have served no significant jail time. Both of them teach at name-brand universities and are headed for cozy retirements like those of the bourgeois parents they so despised during their Weathermen days. Ayers has further cushioned his future by writing a maddeningly evasive memoir, ''Fugitive Days'' -- one of those books that tell by not telling.

The jacket copy is the kind of agitprop that could have been written by the young Ayers himself. In it we learn that ''Bill Ayers was born into privilege,'' and we are given to understand throughout ''Fugitive Days'' that privilege is a crime, if not a badge of shame.... The class guilt drums on and on....

The Weathermen's other great theme was blackness. They fetishized it. Not just any blackness, mind you, but poor, angry blackness that tended toward violence and criminality....

When the Weathermen move underground, he likens the group to ''black Americans who must know everything about the dominant culture while remaining . . . invisible to that culture.'' When the group blows up a building, the act is cast as revenge for the power structure's ruthless attacks on the ''black struggle.'' This affinity, by the way, is what landed Kathy Boudin -- Bryn Mawr graduate and famous lawyer's daughter -- among the criminals who robbed that Brink's truck.

''Fugitive Days'' contains a great many obfuscations. Chief among them is the author's reluctance to mention Boudin. The two had a longstanding acquaintance that probably began in Cleveland during their S.D.S. days. They would certainly have known each other by 1969, when the Weathermen split off from S.D.S. in pursuit of a more perfect radicalism. Years later, after Boudin went to jail for the armored truck robbery, Ayers and Dohrn took custody of her young son, Chesa, who was not yet 2 years old. The absence of Boudin in the book is peculiar, especially since she became famous in the event that forms the emotional center of ''Fugitive Days,'' the explosion that leveled the Greenwich Village town house the Weathermen were using as a bomb factory in 1970. Boudin survived the explosion, walking naked from the wreckage and onto the F.B.I.'s most wanted list. But the blast killed three people, including Ayers's lover, Diana Oughton, who was later identified from a fragment of finger.

Ayers fixates on the explosion.... Ayers sifts and sifts this event, but somehow avoids mentioning Boudin -- even as he recounts meeting with ''two of the comrades who'd come out of the explosion alive,'' one of whom had to have been Boudin.

We can only guess why he fails to mention her. One possibility is that he wished to avoid adverse publicity at a time when Boudin was seeking parole. There is also a more complicated possibility. Ayers wants us to see Oughton as a revolutionary saint who struggled against the Weathermen's bomb-based violence. He imagines that she blew up the town house deliberately, killing her comrades and herself, to prevent the explosives from being used against their targets. The notion that Oughton resisted the group's more violent tendencies is borne out in Lucinda Franks's 1981 New York Times Magazine account of an argument that is said to have consumed the day and the night before the explosion. Franks suggests that Boudin favored using antipersonnel bombs, and that Oughton had misgivings.

The story of Oughton's struggle is poignant, whether or not it's true. But elsewhere in ''Fugitive Days'' the task of choosing among the true, the near true and the untrue is frustrating. Ayers reminds us often that he can't tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. But his partial retelling reaches fraudulence when he writes, ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' then backs and fills, saying that he bombed it, not literally but metaphorically, as part of the Weathermen group in charge of the operation. He says that he needed to ''claim'' the explosion in order to write about it, and he adds later that he is not ashamed of any of the bombings and would not rule out planting another bomb someday; ''I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.''

In Ayers's hands, a career in terrorism becomes a harmless episode out of a John le Carré novel, in which our hero lives on the run, steals explosives, sets off explosions using ''tradecraft,'' as the flap copy puts it -- as if the Weathermen were characters in ''Smiley's People.'' But the Weathermen game was never really a game. Nor was it ever noble, or even moral. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, readers will find this playacting with violence very difficult to forgive.

And Ayers and Dohrn are still tenured professors in Chicago. Boudin was paroled in 2003. The two police officers are still dead. Oughton is still dead. Why and how Ayers and Dohrn have managed to become rehabilitated in the eyes of some liberals is still astonishing to me.

Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly has some beautiful photos of his cats for Friday catblogging (especially Domino, on the left). But what I'm really jealous of is the photo of his other cat, Inkblot, supervising gardening! Here in Ithaca it's cold, snowy, and icy, and we're beset by the flu. No sign of spring yet. I'd love to be gardening!

So, herewith, some cat photos -

The cat, of course, sitting on my chair.

Another favorite cat spot, when he wants to sit close to me - on the laser printer.

And then when I'm sitting at the computer and he's looking for a warm (although not a soft!) perch - on top of the tuner.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Last night I went out in the cold to take a look at the lunar eclipse as it was just starting. I managed to get a few photos which look kind of eerie, and also a photo of the house across the street. One of the moon photos looks like it's surrounded by crackly ice.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Through a referrer file, I came across a blog with a cool name - Merkavah Vision. My sometime correspondent Deane appears to be the blog author. Great graphics. How about some comments on Merkavah Mysticism?

Monday, February 18, 2008

A fine article by Norm Geras - Too much Holocaust, countering an article by Tony Judt that too much attention is being paid to the Holocaust.

Judt's final difficulty, as it had to be in view of what has gone before, is the relation of the Holocaust to arguments about Israel and the Palestinians. It has several components, some of which have already been foreshadowed in what has gone before. (a) Judt deplores the way the Holocaust is invoked to deflect criticism of Israel by the suggestion that such criticism is a stimulus to anti-Semitism or just is anti-Semitism without further ado. (b) In fact, the reverse is true, he says: it is the taboo on criticism of Israel and a too intense focus on the Holocaust that are stimulants to cynicism and anti-Semitism. (c) Relative to other minority groups in the US and Europe, the Jews are not especially stigmatized, threatened or excluded; they are successful, and prominent in many spheres. (d) The Holocaust may 'lose its universal resonance' if it is too closely attached to the defence of a single country; as things are, if you ask outside the West, ask amongst Africans and Asians, what lessons there are from the Shoah, the responses 'are not very reassuring'.

What is striking about these arguments of Judt's is their unqualified, their completely one-sided, character. It is true that the Jewish tragedy in Europe is sometimes misused to justify or excuse Israeli policies that should not be defended. But to say this without noting that there is also anti-Semitic hostility to Israel, in the Arab world and in the West, some of it perfectly overt and some of it more discreet, is to pretend that anti-Semitism is a smaller problem than it is. To lament such misuses of the Holocaust without mentioning the misuses in the opposite direction that equate Israel with the spirit and the methods of the Nazis is to see with only one eye. The same goes for writing as if the most serious sources of anti-Semitism might be arguments used by defenders of Israel or an over-emphasis on the Shoah. Really? This is a centuries-old hatred, and yet here we find ourselves in a situation where it is defence of the Jewish state and memory of the genocide against the Jews that are the stimulants of anti-Semitism; these, at any rate, are Tony Judt's sources of choice.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

The Stuff White People Like blog is painfully accurate - catch especially the entry on the Prius or on reading the New York Times on Sunday mornings. It's a bit generationally limited - 80s nights certainly don't draw me in - but it hilariously catches the upper middle class leftish white people aesthetic.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Stumper, a blog on the Newsweek website, posted a story today (Stumper: Obama Won One New York County) on Obama's win in Tompkins County, that argued for why this win may portend something for future primary states. I don't know if I buy the author's argument, but he reproduced the cool New York Times graphic of the tan Tompkins Country surrounded by grayish blue. And so here it is:

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

I've been following the election tonight (of course), and the state of New York has gone for Clinton (not a big surprise, since she's a very popular senator) - but the only county in the state that went for Obama is where I live, Tompkins County. I'm not particularly surprised - it's likely that we're the most liberal county in the state. Cornell University and Ithaca College are here, as is a large community of people who came here for college and never left, and lots of old hippies who have also never left. It's just highly amusing to look at the county-level map of New York on the New York Times website and see that this is the only Obama county.

When I went to vote this afternoon in the Fall Creek elementary school, there was a long line of people waiting to vote in the Democratic line. This is the first primary I've ever voted in where I actually had to wait to vote. Usually hardly anyone shows up to them. But it was fun to be part of a crowd. And if the voting went according to the lawn signs that have been put up in Fall Creek, more of them were voting for Obama than for Clinton.

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About Me

I teach at Ithaca College, do research on early Jewish magic and mysticism, visit Israel frequently, and enjoy the lovely Finger Lakes region of New York State. This is my personal blog, and the statements in it reflect only my own views, not those of Ithaca College.